The ever increasing reliance on networking among competing businesses in the free market and the meteoric or growth of the internet and online services are strong evidences to the benefits of shared data and shared resources. Increasingly, companies, corporations, organizations or associations and the like are finding more and more that wireless communication and, particularly, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are an indispensable addition to the more traditional wired local area networks (wired LANs) to satisfy the needs for mobility, relocation, ad hoc networking, and coverage of locations difficult to wire. Through the benefits of wireless LANs (WLANs), wireless terminal users can access shared information without having to find a plug-in for their terminal and on the management side, networks can be set up or augmented without having to install new wirings or alter previously installed wirings. With wireless LANS, advantages in convenience as well as in improved productivity and reduced future costs over traditional wired networks are evident.
The wireless LAN is completely transparent to the user, exactly like the wired LAN, but without the limitations of having to be physically hooked up to a wired connection. In a wireless LAN environment, your office is where your wireless terminal is located such as a wireless phone, Personal Digital Assistance (PDA), a palmtop device, and a portable computer such as a notebook/laptop computer which operates wirelessly and which may also have a phone hookup capability.
Traditionally, company phonebooks which have been available electronically to company personnel have been done so through the facility of a web browser on a Personal Computer (PC) such as a desktop connected to the wired LAN. Under such a wired scheme, a company employee, for example, can only access numbers that are stored centrally, for example, using a shared drive, while locally stored numbers (within the user's database) cannot be accessed easily through the network. That is, conventionally, one can access a remotely located phonebook information in a communication system such as a company network using a PC connected to the network with a separate contacts application, as in MICROSOFT OUTLOOK. However, such phonebook application is not tightly integrated with access to the local phonebook information at the user's terminal. Moreover, such contacts application has been typically used more so for storage or viewing of E-mail addresses rather than to access phone numbers and to initiate calls.
Another earlier developed scheme pertains to the SPT 1700 Product Family developed by Symbol Technologies, Inc. That is, this product family is directed to products including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities in which the terminal user can make an outgoing call by locating the personal Internet Protocol (IP) number of the person or party to be called which is stored in the local memory in the wireless phone database. In such a product family, the information is stored into the local database, namely, into the wireless phone database, for example, by himself or herself. Although there are other more current wireless terminal products, which have even much greater storage capability in the local database, a phonebook database is, basically, limited to that available in the local phonebook, namely, in the wireless terminal database.
Another prior known scheme is the CISCO CALLMANAGER such as VERSION 2.4. The Cisco CallManager software has a number of integrated voice applications that perform voice conferencing, manual Web attendant console, a click-to-call function and other functions. In addition, a MICROSOFT WINDOWS TAPI (Telepathy Applications Programming Interface) is available for the Cisco active phonebook, which has a click-to-call function and a browsable directory. In accordance with this active phonebook application, one can place a call or reply to a call or put the call on hold from a PC. Typically, according to such a scheme, the PC user would wear a headset for voice communication while browsing the screen on the PC, which is wired to the network. Solutions like the CISCO ACTIVE PHONEBOOK relate to schemes in which a call comes through the ‘The Data World’ over the intranet/internet and only voice communication and needed controls are performed by the voice terminal, namely, the user phone. For example, with regard to a phonebook directory, one can connect his or her PDA or a palm phone to the serial port of his or her PC and download phone numbers, addresses, E-mail addresses, and other contact information from the network to the database of the PDA or palm phone for later use, namely, when the phone or PDA is in the wireless mode. That is, such phonebook information is downloaded to a local database while in an offline connection with the network. Such downloading of information would require considerable storage space in the local database (associated with the wireless terminal). In addition to consuming a large amount of local storage space, the information that is stored locally does not remain up-to-date for too long.
In most modern office Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs), there are kept records of outgoing calls. Some PBXs can be equipped with call tracking software which enables also tracking of incoming calls. In helpdesk kind of phone software equipment, the information on incoming calls is stored in customer databases. In most cases this kind of information can only be viewed on user's PC screen. The biggest drawback related to the traditional way of viewing call related data is the fact that such type of call tracking software always requires a PC (wired to the network). Further, there is another drawback, namely, it is not possible to view additional online data such as tasks, E-mails and documents related to originating or terminating calls and the like, simultaneously. As an example, a wireless Digital European Cordless Telecommunication (DECT) phone such as with regard to Alcatel's PBX equipment shows the number/name of caller, date and time of call and call duration associated with the last 20 calls. However, in addition to limiting the view to only the last 20 calls, the calls cannot be sorted on the basis of the caller.
FIG. 13 illustrates an example of a conventional incoming call identification process associated with a wireless terminal in a wireless LAN. In this example, the wireless terminal has a database which stores phonebook information—although limited by the size of the storage database. The stored information is either inputted by the wireless terminal user (owner) and/or downloaded through an offline connection to a network PC. In accordance with such a scheme, when the wireless terminal has an incoming call, it identifies the phone number of the caller through a caller line identification process at the terminal side (S1 in FIG. 13) and compares this phone number to the phonebook database that is stored locally in the user terminal (S2). If this comparison leads to a match (S3), the caller name is displayed on the wireless terminal screen (S4) whereby the caller ID process ends (S5). If a match is not found, only the caller phone number is displayed at the user terminal (S6) and the caller ID process ends.
This conventional approach has similar drawbacks as that earlier discussed. For one, the user has to enter the number and/or any other contact information in the local phonebook (e.g., the user terminal database) before making the call. Further, the wireless terminal or handset, typically, does not have enough memory to handle/store the entire company (network) phonebook. Moreover, the phonebook and/or any background information which may have been previously stored in a database may no longer be accurate due to a continual updating of the server/databases by the network.